Meeting the fear

What is between you and the sense of living more whole? Have you ever asked yourself this question?

Mostly it's fear. The fear of failure, of not enough, of rejection and the fear of missing out. Today I’ll talk about the first one.

It comes from a sense of shame and isolation. We get in contact with this fear when we get caught up, when we feel small, through our Ego Self.

This fear is deeply rooted in the society we live in, the collective conditions, a culture that is always rating us: grades, followers, numbers, achievements.

It’s like when we were in school, trying to always prove we are smarter than we are.

It’s tiring. It’s exhausting. It takes away from our own authenticity, our own truth. We spend a huge amount of energy feeding into it without even being aware we are doing so and all this energy could be redirected towards our alignment.

The thing with this fear is that our whole sense of Self can get organized and built around it and this is precisely what is blocking us from living a more whole life, because it makes us small, fragmented.

It makes us want to come back to the shell to stay protected, to avoid failure, to avoid rejection.

To cope with this fear we start to create strategies around it to cover it up, to get the approval we seek from ourselves and from others, to get the validation that we are enough.

Now, with any fear rather than excluding it, we need to include it.

First, we bring awareness to look within and see what kind of information it can give you to work with. To move and flow from the shell.

We contact the fear and we create space to hold that fear.

We don’t need to get rid of it or run away from it. We can invite it in and use it as a doorway to see what’s there, what’s holding us back, what’s adding to the suffering, to this sense of feeling blocked and not enough.

Let’s investigate:

When do you start to feel small, fragmented? Where do you fall short?

What parts get caught up?

Maybe at work? With a certain relationship?

Perhaps a fear of making a mistake that will make you lose approval or respect?

A fear of not feeling good enough, smart enough, pretty enough, successful enough?

If there’s a situation where you anticipate failure, take a moment and allow yourself to go inside a bit, check the types of thoughts there:

What’s going to happen?

What are your strategies to try to protect yourself?

Notice your fixation on it.

The energy, the time you spend entertaining it.

Running all scenarios.

Just notice the fear of failure living in your body and heart.

And part of sensing it is realizing this is not my fear.

This is the fear.

You are realizing how you are getting caught.

This is the fear of failure.

This is what it likes.

Now, what is the pay off you are getting holding onto this fear so tightly?